Under new sentence, Kansan who killed her rapist could still spend life in prison
Remember Sarah Gonzales-McLinn? Sure you do. She’s the young Kansas woman who was sentenced to a minimum of 50 years in prison for killing the man who’d been raping her regularly when she was 19 and he was 52.
The crime was so grisly — she drugged and nearly decapitated Hal Sasko, then scrawled “FREEDOM” on the wall in his blood — that neither authorities nor the media ever got past the narrative that this kindly gent had taken in a troubled teen, and look how that turned out. Police and prosecutors knew better than that from the beginning, though, according to their own reports, and reporters should have, too.
Of course, this was in 2014, and we’ve learned so much about sexual abuse since then, right?
Today, surely, Douglas County police and prosecutors would not present a teenager they knew to have been preyed upon — turned into a “Barbie doll” by her former employer, she said, and eventually pressured into surgery that made her a curvier playtoy — as someone who’d killed to see what killing would feel like.
Just lately, Gonzales-McLinn and her family had gotten their hopes up — way up, actually — after Suzanne Valdez, the new Douglas County district attorney, met with Sarah in her first month after taking office.
So they were devastated all over again, Gonzales-McLinn’s mother, Michelle Gonzales, told me in an interview, when they learned on Friday that Valdez is planning to file a motion that her daughter’s sentence be reduced from a “hard 50” to a “hard 25,” or a minimum of 25 years in prison.
In other words, she could still spend the rest of her life behind bars.
“We’re so upset,” Gonzales said, crying hard, “because why did you” — Valdez, she means — “go meet her and sit there and tell her you have compassion for women of color? It’s just knocked her back again, and me, too. And this whole #MeToo movement: Do you have to have money to get that? Do you have to have power? Because they don’t apply to the average person. I’m a mess, so I can’t even comfort her.”
“I’m heartbroken,” she went on, because Valdez “said this, and now it’s all different? What happened? You shouldn’t have offered hope, then. You shouldn’t have said those things.” Once again, she said, her daughter “believed in someone” and now feels betrayed.
She forwarded me a message from Gonzales-McLinn’s lawyer, Jonathan Sternberg, that said, “the final offer is 25-life on first degree murder. I had hoped for better.”
Previous district attorney questioned abuse
I texted Valdez, to ask if there’s anything we don’t know about why the offer is so much harsher than her family had expected, and she answered that under ethics rules, “the State cannot comment at this time.”
Valdez was rightly critical of her predecessor Charles Branson’s record on cases involving violence against women. She ran on that issue, and won easily.
Let’s hope this loss of nerve isn’t because some of the Branson holdovers in the DA’s office are sticking up for their own unjust handiwork in prosecuting Gonzales-McLinn. But I will say that it’s going to be hard to make anything like a new start with the old team still in place.
In court, Branson questioned whether Gonzales-McLinn had really been sexually abused as a child or raped and burned with cigarettes in high school, though she was treated for trauma nightmares when she was 13, told a doctor about flashbacks at 14, and was hospitalized and diagnosed with PTSD following a suicide attempt after the rape, when she was 16 years old.
The D.A. made her out to be the manipulator in her relationship — if it can even be called that — with a man 33 years her senior who coerced her sexually and wanted to remake her through cosmetic surgery. A psychiatrist testifying for the prosecution referred to Sasko as Gonzales-McLinn’s “benefactor.” At 14, she’d gone to work for him at one of the Cicis pizza restaurants he owned, and at 17, he’d convinced her to move in with him.
The prosecution argued that she had killed for “entertainment” and used a knife instead of a gun to “maximize that experience” of “the hot blood when it went over her hands and her arms.” While Sasko, the prosecution argued, had never done anything except offer Gonzales-McLinn a job and a home.
But the first time police interviewed Gonzales-McLinn, not long after Sasko’s death, according to a transcript of that interview, one of the first things Detective Jamie Lawson said to her was, “We understand that there’s two sides of Hal. … We know that he was having some troubles. We know a lot of things about him.”
A police report shows that even before this initial interview with Gonzales-McLinn, an associate of Sasko’s had told detectives about Sasko’s drug use and “drug running,” and said that Sasko, whom he described as “controlling,” massively in debt and “going down hill,” had bragged about what it was like to “have” an 18-year-old.
‘Essentially a long-term captive’
Gonzales-McLinn told forensic psychologist Marilyn Hutchinson, in many hours of interviews, that she’d seen Sasko as a father figure when she moved in. But he kept a running account of the money he said she owed him, and as that sum mounted, he started forcing her into sex several times a week. She’d refuse, she said, but “he would just act like he didn’t hear me. Or, like, when I would move my arms, like, he would just hold my arms.” So “I would get as drunk as I could and just lay there.”
Hutchinson concluded in her report that she “believed she was essentially a long-term captive of Sasko” and that “like a battered woman, she was demeaned, controlled and over time felt worse and worse.”
So now what? This does not have to be the final offer, does it? I still believe that Valdez does want to do the right thing for Gonzales-McLinn, who has already served 7 years.
(As I’m sure she’s well aware, men who kill their female partners are sentenced to an average of two to six years in prison, while women who kill their partners are sentenced on average to 15 years. Not that Sasko ever was a “partner.”)
On Sunday afternoon, I was thinking about all this while listening to Princeton University’s Eddie Glaude Jr. talking about his new book, “Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own,” on C-SPAN Radio. “Politicians inevitably disappoint,” Glaude said. “They are only as good as our demands of them.” Professor, you are right on both counts.
We can help Valdez be the DA she promised to be by demanding that we move into this century in sentencing for women like Gonzales-McLinn.
This story was originally published March 1, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
